The present invention relates to a method of providing services in a network offering a plurality of independent service elements.
The present invention also relates to a network element for use as a gateway in a network, and to a computer program product comprising program code sequences operable to implement a network gateway function.
Next-generation communication services will be composed of multiple individual services or service elements. Each service element will typically be responsible for a specific interaction mode (e.g., audio communication) or content type (e.g., delivering location information to a user). Richer user experience will be created by combining a number of individual services to support multi-modal scenarios, thus forming service compositions. In such scenarios, coordination of interaction with the user, managing of used network resources and customization of service behaviour will be important issues.
With the upcoming evolution to 3G (3rd Generation) and broadband networks, users expect to be able to communicate more easily and to share data in the form of photos, images, audio files, personal contents, etc. in real-time with other users in the network. In this new network environment, content providers want to be able to deliver richer media to customers by combining voice, video, images, text, etc. from multiple choice sources within a single session. In this context, many different combinations of media types and delivery channels can be envisaged. Higher-level programming environments can be devised to allow rapid customization of offered services. For example, an enterprise customer or content provider may define specific service offerings or service features for their target users, i.e., enterprise employees or content consumers.
Prior art approaches to service composition in the field of telecommunications have generally taken a network-centric approach. In 2G or TDM (time division multiplex) networks, feature interaction (i.e., being able to invoke multiple advanced features, and being able to detect conflicts between those features, within a single voice call, such as prepaid billing and number translation) has been widely used. With the evolution to SIP (session initiation protocol)-based networks, a new concept called SCIM (service capability interaction manager) has been introduced to tackle the issue of how to invoke multiple SIP-based applications within a single SIP session. Again, the SCIM model has approached the problem of service composition from the point of view of a network session, and is primarily concerned with detecting and managing conflicts between different network applications. In this way, SCIM does not support building composed services by external entities.
In the Internet world, where services are primarily delivered to a personal computer (PC) client, the issue of service composition has been avoided to a large extent. When multiple services want to interact with the user, they typically do so in parallel, with each service allocating its own resources and creating its own window on the PC screen. Service priority is decided on by the PC operating system (or the user, via a mouse click). However, this approach is of limited use only since it does not work in the context of telecommunications, as typical user devices are less powerful and the access networks used for accessing the network are limited in capacity.